Posture Health Alexander Technique

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Alexander Technique scientific briefing

THE ROLE OF THE POSTURAL REFLEXES

in

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Gerald Foley

DRAFT

11 July 2009


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SECTION 1: BACKGROUNDUnderstanding of the nervous system began to grow rapidly from the middle of the

19th century. Charles Sherringtons experimental studies during the 1890s resulted in

some of the key scientific breakthroughs but it was his master-work The integrative

action of the nervous system published in 1906 which synthesised what had gonebefore and created the still-existing framework of modern neuroscience. Rudolph

Magnus, taking inspiration from Sherrington, began work on the postural reflexes in

1908 and produced the definitive study of their functioning in 1924.

To discuss either reflex and posture without defining them is inviting trouble. Bothwords are so encrusted with popular impressions that hardly any two people would

agree on what exactly they mean by them. The following discussion is not an attempt

to lay down the law on what these terms should mean. It is simply to clarify from

the beginning how they are used in this paper.

Charles Sherrington and Rudolph Magnus

These two distinguished scientists share the common fate of many great pioneers in

their subjects. Their work defined the territory and became so widely and deeply

taken for granted that people no longer refer to their original contribution. As thispaper is specifically concerned with their findings on the postural reflexes, it is worth

putting their findings into context by giving a brief account of their careers.

Charles Sherrington

Sherrington was born in 1857. A bright student, he qualified as a member of the

Royal College of Surgeons in 1884 and obtained a medical degree from CambridgeUniversity in 1885.

In 1891, he became the Physician-Superintendent of an animal research centre, calledthe Brown Institute in the University of London. In the four years he spent there he

produced a stream of research papers which began to build the foundation on whichmodern neurology is based.1He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1893

and became Professor of Physiology at Liverpool University in 1895. This was one

of the most productive periods of Sherringtons career. He became professor of

Physiology at Oxford in 1913 and remained there until his retirement in 1936 at the

age of 79.

He published a total of 320 scientific papers in his career covering nearly every aspectof mammalian nervous functioning. He identified the function of the synapse in the

nervous system, and coined the name; he found that reflexes must be regarded asintegrated actions of the total organism, not isolated activities of groups of muscles as

was believed at the time; and carried out a variety of experimental studies on the

postural functions of the nervous system.

Additionally he maintained a broad range of cultural interests. His last book was a

life of the 16thcentury French physician Jean Fernel whom Sherrington saw as a key

figure in the emergence of the scientific attitude. This was published as The

Endeavour of Jean Fernel in 1946. The following year The integrative action of the

nervous system was republished as a tribute to Sherrington on his ninetieth birthday.

1Cohen (1958)p7


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He contributed a long new introduction which showed how little the intervening forty

years had dimmed his interest and intellectual capacities.

He became President of the Royal Society in 1920, received his knighthood in 1922,

the Order of Merit in 1924, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932. In addition he

received numerous international honours. He died in 1952.

Rudolph Magnus

It was Rudolph Magnus, rather than Sherrington himself, who carried out the defining

studies on the postural reflexes. Magnus was born in Germany in 1873 and studied in

the University of Heidelberg where he qualified as a medical doctor with aspecialisation in pharmacology in 1898. He then took up a position in the

pharmacology department in the University and became an associate professor. At

that stage in his career, he was primarily interested in the physiological effects of

drugs and kept in touch with the rapid developments in physiology then taking place.

He attended the Third International Physiology Congress in Berne in 1895 where he

witnessed an experiment by Sherrington.2

Three years later at another internationalphysiology congress, this time in Cambridge, he saw an experiment by Sherrington

which he described as elegant.3 In the meantime, his own reputation in

pharmacology was growing and he presented some of the results of his research intothe effects of various drugs on intestinal functioning at an international congress in

1904.

Like many of the major scientists of his day, he had a broad classical education and

was particularly interested in Goethe and Kant. Round this time, he gained access tothe collection of Goethes scientific experimental equipment at the Goethe Museum in

Weimar and persuaded the museum authorities to allow him to repeat the experimentson which Goethes had based his theory of colour. Arising from this experimental

work and his research into the Goethe archives, Magnus delivered a series of lectures

on Goethe as a scientist at the University of Heidelberg. These appeared in book form

in 1906 and were published in an English translation in 1949.4

Magnus remained interested in philosophical issues all his life and was particularly

curious about how the nervous system provides us with a priori or innate

knowledge. This was, in fact, to be the subject of a lecture at Stanford University,

never delivered because of his death, but which was published some years later.5 In

1908, he visited Sherrington in Liverpool and spent some time working with him in

his laboratory on a problem of muscle excitation. This visit changed the course of

Magnus life.

His biographer comments:

he could not have anticipated that this would be the start of a long

series of investigations on posture for which he would gain lasting

international recognition.6

On his return to the University of Utrecht, where he had just been appointed Professor

of Pharmacology, he set up a programme to investigate the neurophysiology of

2O. Magnus (2002)p51

3Ibid. p66

4

Ibid. p1455Magnus (1930)p97

6O. Magnus (2002)p143


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posture. It turned out to be a task which occupied the greater part of his scientific

talents for the rest of his life. Sherrington, despite his own interest in the subject, wascontent to leave the bulk of the research on posture to Magnus and his colleagues in

Utrecht.

In his contacts with Magnus, Sherrington had clearly converted him to the view that

the question of posture was not only more complex than it looked at first sight, butthat it also opened up fruitful areas of investigation into the overall functioning of the

neuromuscular system. When presenting the results of his work some eighteen years

later, Magnus had this to say about why he had chosen posture as his primary research

subject

Movement affords many points of attack for research because by

movement, changes in the condition of the body or its parts occur,

which attract the attention of the observer and can be recorded and

measured. This is not the case when posture is studied so that our

desire for causality is not stimulated, and we therefore do not

immediately suppose that active processes are at work. Inconsequence of this the physiology of posture is of relatively recent

date and many facts to be described in these lectures have been

discovered by still living scientists among whom Sherrington must be

named in the first place. The chief result of these investigations is that

posture is an active process, and is the result of the cooperation of a

great number of reflexes, many of which have a tonic character.7

The First World War disrupted research activities as well as communication between

the two men and it was the mid-1920s before the full fruits of Magnus work were

made public. Not long afterwards, in 1927, he died unexpectedly at the age of 54

while on holiday in Switzerland. Although it was widely expected he would benominated for the Nobel Prize in that year it is not awarded posthumously.

What is a reflex?

Even among scientists, the term reflex is used in a variety of ways. Because of the

lack of an agreed definition, some authors have even wondered whether the

distinction between reflex and voluntary has any remaining scientific justification.8

But if care is taken to be clear about what is meant by it, the term reflex can fill a

need.

For the purpose of the present paper, Sherringtons definition is adopted. In his

introduction to the 1947 re-publication of The integrative action of the nervoussystem he wrote:

The behaviour of the spider is reported to be entirely reflex; but reflex

action, judging by what we can sample of it, would go little way

toward meeting the life of external relation of a horse or cat or dog,

still less of ourselves. As life develops it would seem that in the field

of external relation conscious behaviour tends to replace reflex, and

conscious acts to bulk larger and larger. Along with this change, and

indeed as part of it, would seem an increased role for habit. Habit

7Magnus (1926a)p531

8Prochazka (2000)


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we do something deliberately, we unconsciously bring into play a huge number of

reflex responses, varying from subtle balancing adjustments in the tone, or tension, inthe muscles in various parts of the body these are referred to as tonic reflexes

through to the quick and often effortful movements of limbs that take place, for

example, when we towel ourselves vigorously after a shower or make a dash for a

bus. The important point is that whatever deliberate action we perform and no matterhow we concentrate on it, the details of the associated supporting and compensatory

muscular contractions and releases happen reflexly, independently of any conscious

input from the brain.

It is thus paradoxical that although we readily take responsibility for our conscious

acts we do not know exactly how we manage to do them. More interestingly, it is the

superstructure of consciousness which enables humans unlike horses, dogs, and still

less spiders to acquire habits that distort and interfere with the working of their

reflexes and undermine the functioning of their own selves. The way in which human

learned behaviour interacts, often detrimentally, with the relationship between the

deliberate and the reflex is a theme which is developed in the later parts of this paper.It is also worth making clear that Sherrington had no sympathy with the reductionist

view that all activity is reflex, simply the result of automatic neurological responses to

external or internal stimuli. Although the reflexes provide the essential underpinning

for all the bodys activities, for Sherrington the volitional decision-making mind

occupies the primary role in human behaviour.

The question of posture

The word posture is also used in widely different ways. Many of its meanings are

associated with deliberately assumed ways of holding the body. Walking about,

stiffly balancing a book on the head, used to be a common way of training youngpeople in what was supposed to be good posture. In this paper, the word posture

refers to the natural, or innate, relationship of the parts of the body to each other in

sitting, standing or walking; it is perhaps best approximated by the old-fashioned

word carriage.

The question of posture, at first sight, seems an unlikely focal point for some of the

major advances in neuroscience made in the early decades of the 20th century. Yet

from an early date Sherrington had seen how the maintenance of posture was just as

complex and demanding of the nervous system as movement.

As he said:

much of the reflex reaction expressed by the skeletal musculature ispostural. The bony and other levers of the body are maintained in

certain attitudes both in regard to the horizon, to the vertical, and to

one anotherInnervation and co-ordination are as fully demanded for

the maintenance of a posture as for the execution of a movement. 12

Far from representing a fixed and rigid configuration of the muscles, posture displays

them in action in patterns as dynamic, if not so immediately evident as those of

movement.

12Sherrington (1906)p339


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Although the experimental work was carried out on animals, the neurological

structures and basic functioning of the nervous system is similar in all vertebrates.Magnus makes a variety of references in his published work to ways in which his

findings shed light on human functioning. The physiologist Berta Bobath, for

example, relied on his findings in developing her methods of diagnosis and treatment

of children suffering from cerebral palsy and related postural abnormalities as a resultof brain damage.14

The vestibular apparatus

The balance, or equilibrium, of the body is intimately related to posture. The term

static equilibrium is often used to refer to when the body is retaining its position

relative to the force of gravity. The body must also be able to retain its balance when

its parts are moved relative to each other and when the whole body is in motion; this

is usually referred to as dynamic equilibrium. Both of these aspects of balance arelargely controlled by the vestibular apparatus.

Since the vestibular apparatus was the subject of many of Magnus experiments, it is

worth outlining briefly what is involved. The inner ear houses a maze of winding

passages, collectively called the labyrinth. The labyrinth is divided into three areas,

the vestibule and, projecting above and backwards from it, the three curved ducts

known as the semicircular canals; and the cochlea which contains the hearing

receptors. Within the vestibule are two sacs, the utricle and saccule, known as the

otolith organs. The utricle and the saccule, together with the semicircular canals, are

known as the organs for equilibrium and make up the vestibular apparatus.

The otolith organs provide information on the tilt of the head. The walls of both the

saccule and the utricle contain a small thickened area called the macula. Each of the

two maculae, which are set at right angles to each other, supports a set of tiny hair

cells. The hair cells are bathed in a gelatinous layer called the otolithic membrane inwhich is embedded a layer of dense calcium carbonate crystals called otoliths otolith

literally means ear-stone.

When the head is in its normal position with the gaze horizontal, the hair cells in the

utricle are positioned horizontally and those in the saccule are positioned vertically.

When the head is then tilted forward, backward or sideways, the otolithic membrane

lags slightly behind the movement of the head. This causes the hair cells to bend,resulting in the transmission of impulses through the utricular and saccular nerves to

the vestibular branch of the vestibulocochlear nerve.15 The otolith organs, in this way,act as a three-dimensional system, a complex type of spirit level, for monitoring the

tilt of the head from moment to moment.The three semicircular canals provide information on movements of the head. They

are set at right angles to each other in three planes and consist of ducts filled with afluid called endolymph. One end of each canal has a small expanded or dilated area

called the ampulla. In each ampulla, there is a ridge or swelling upwards from the

base of the canal called the crista. On top of the crista, a group of hair cells projects

upwards and is covered by a small mass of gelatinous material called the cupula.

When the head moves, the movement of the cupula, because of its inertia, is delayed

slightly compared to that of the head. This drags the hair cells on the crista out of

14Bobath (1985)p

15Davson (1990)p678


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their resting position, causing them to generate nerve impulses. Smooth movement is

insufficient to stimulate the semicircular canals; there must be a change in the rate ofmovement, either acceleration or deceleration. These nerve impulses are collected in

the ampullary nerves and are also fed into the vestibular branch of the

vestibulocochlear nerve.

Magnus findings

Magnus and his colleagues published numerous scientific papers as their research

proceeded so that the scientific world was kept aware of their progress. Their detailed

final report covering the findings of the whole research project was published in

German under the title Korperstellung in 1924. Although this volume was nottranslated into English until 1987, this was not the problem it would be today since

most scientists of Magnus time were literate in German, which had been regarded as

the language of science in the 19th century. In 1924, Magnus scientific reputation

was already high as a result of his published papers and with the publication of the

final report his full research results would have been accessible to all the leadingneuro-physiologists around the world.

The first major public presentation of Magnus work in English was in the 1925

Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society in London, with Sherrington, who was at that

time President of the Royal Society, in the chair. It was probably the most prestigious

setting of the time for the public announcement of important scientific work. Magnus

also presented his findings in 1926 in the two Cameron Prize Lectures in the

University of Edinburgh, both of which were reprinted in The Lancet in the same

year.

As a starting point for his Royal Society lecture, Magnus identified four aspects of

posture which he felt needed to be examined in detail. He termed them, partialproblems and listed them as reflex standing,normal distribution of tone, attitude,and

the righting function. This division is, of course, artificial since in the intact animal

all these aspects of posture are present and interacting all the time. But considering

them separately provides additional insights into what is involved in the totality of

posture, both when it is working properly and when it malfunctions.

Reflex standing

If an animal is to stand normally, the muscles used in standing must be able to

maintain the necessary tone. Magnus found that spinal animals, those in which thewhole brain had been extirpated, were capable of complex movements when they

were suspended in an upright position. They were, for example, able to make runningand walking movements when the pads of their feet were stimulated, showing that

these actions are controlled in the spinal cord. But these animals collapsed if they

were placed in a standing position.

Magnus remarks:

The centres of the spinal cord can indeed cause and regulate very

complicated combinations of movements, but they are unable to give

the muscles that steady and enduring tone which is necessary for

simple standing.16

16Magnus (1925)p341


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Ed When more of the brain was left in place by making the cut further up the

brainstem, somewhere between the medulla oblongata and the foremost part of themidbrain, the animal was able to stand. But it did so in a state of what is called

decerebrate rigidity. The antigravity muscles, the extensors of the limbs, the

extensors of the back, the elevators of the neck and tail, and the closing muscles of the

jaws, had abnormally high tone, whereas their antagonists, the flexors, had virtuallynone. The overall result was that, although the animal could stand if it were placed

on its feet, the distribution of tone was abnormal and the animals posture was stiff

and distorted.17

Magnus makes the additional comment:

The stimuli inducing the enduring tone of the standing muscles in

decerebrate rigidity arise from different sources, the proprioceptive

sense organs in the contracted muscles themselves playing the most

prominent role.18

He is pointing out here that excessive muscle tone, once it has developed, has atendency to become self-sustaining. This is because when there is excess tension inthe muscles their own internal sensing organs, their proprioceptors, are stimulated to

produce signals to the nervous system which result in that state being maintained.

Normal distribution of tone

In normal standing, the extensor and flexor muscles have the level of tone required to

keep them in balance with each other. Magnus found that this occurred when the cut

in the brain was made at such a level that the thalamus was included, producing whatthe researchers called a mid-brain animal or a thalamus animal. In these creatures, he

found that both the distribution of muscle tone and the standing posture were more orless normal.

He says:

In the thalamus animal the extensors of the limbs just have sufficient

tension to balance the weight of the body against gravity, so that every

force tending to raise or lower the body can easily move it in one or

the other direction.19

This was a persuasive experimental demonstration that in the case of these animals

normal standing, including gentle movement around the equilibrium position, even

though it involves complex interactions throughout the whole skeletal muscle system,

was working as a wholly reflex activity and was able to take place in the absence of

the cerebral cortex.

Attitude

Magnus uses the term attitudeto refer to how the parts of the body relate positionally

to each other. The attitudinal reflexescome into action when the position or the tone

in one part changes in relation to the rest of the body. An example of this is when a

part of the body is braced or stiffened. As this happens, the attitudinal reflexes bring

about compensatory changes in the rest of the body so that the muscular systemremains in an overall state of balanced tone.

17

Ibid. p34118Ibid. p341

19Ibid. p342


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Magnus remarks:

It is noteworthy that these reflexes are most easily evoked from the

foremost part of the body, from the head, in which the teleceptive sense

organs are situated, so that distance stimuli influencing the position of

the head can in this way also impress different attitudes upon the

whole body. One can, in fact, in the decerebrate animal, by simply

changing the position of the head, give to the body a great number of

attitudes, resembling closely the normal harmonious attitudes of the

intact animal.20

By the teleceptive sense organs, Magnus means those sense organs which detectobjects at a distance, as opposed to the proprioceptors which detect changes inside the

body. The eyes are the most important teleceptors in humans and many otheranimals; but hearing and the sense of smell are equally or more important in others.

He is pointing out that when these teleceptive organs detect an object it tends to

evoke changes in the position of the head; we look towards the object the eyes have

detected or seek the source of the smell. The change in the position of the head,through the medium of the vestibular system and the neck proprioceptors, brings

about reflex changes in the muscles in the rest of the body.

As Magnus describes it:

It is possible, by giving to the head different positions, to change the

distribution of tone in the whole body musculature The most striking

reactions appear in the extensors of the limbs and in the neck muscles.

The effects observed are the result of combined reflexes from the

labyrinths and from proprioceptive neck receptors, and in this way,

it is possible to impress upon the whole body different adapted

attitudes by changing only the position of the head.21

As an example of the attitudinal reflexes at work in an intact animal, Magnus

instances a cat standing in the middle of a room. A mouse runs along the foot of one

wall, attracting the cats attention. The simple act of turning its head to watch themouse evokes a series of attitudinal reflexes which automatically put the cat into a

posture of readiness, with the weight on three paws, and the other slightly lifted andready to move. The result is that if a signal to pounce were to come from its cortex,

the cat is perfectly poised for action.

Magnus description of what is taking place here is a model of meticulous observation

and analysis:

The distribution of excitability in the motor centres of the spinal cord

is rearranged by the turning of the neck, so that, if for some reason

running movements begin, the limb which has no static function will

always make the first step. In this way, the moving mouse impresses

on the cat, through the mediation of tonic neck reflexes an attitude, by

which the cat is focussed towards the mouse and made ready for

movement. The only thing the cat has to do is to decide: to jump or not

to jump; all other things have been prepared beforehand reflexly under

20Ibid. p342

21Magnus (1926a)p534


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multitudinous inputs from the proprioceptors and the exteroceptors, those organs

sensing the external world, was an extreme example.

This is how Magnus put it in the Croonian Lecture in 1925:

The lower centres for the muscles of the different parts of the body are

arranged segmentally in the spinal cord; the higher centres in thebrainstem put them into combined action and in this way govern the

posture of the animal as a whole. We have here a very good example

of what Sherrington has called the integrative action of the nervous

system. And integration is particularly necessary in the case of

posture, because nervous excitations arising from different sense

organs are flowing towards the postural centres in the brain-stem, and

must be combined so that a harmonising effect will result. 36

InBody Posturehe summarises his conclusions:

The result of the present study is that in the brain stem, from the upper

cervical cord to the midbrain, lies a complicated central nervousapparatus that governs the entire body posture in a coordinated

manner. It unites the musculature of the whole body in a common

performance37

But although he was happy that he had identified this area of the lower brain as the

location of the key nerve centres necessary for the normal functioning of the postural

reflexes, he saw this conclusion as the starting point for further investigation. As hesaid:

at least a beginning has been made with the anatomic-physiologic

disentangling of the central apparatus for the body posture. Apart

from establishing the general arrangements of centers and pathways invarious parts of the brain stem, it has been possible to ascertain the

function (or a part of the function) of at least one anatomically known

nucleus, and to determine the anatomic position of the centers for a

few physiologic functions.38

The recognised that the amount of work required to identify what was happening at a

detailed level was huge. He outlined the task in the following words:

For the majority of reflexes it is not yet known what anatomically

known structures (nuclei), localized physiologically in specific regions

are involved, in which anatomically known pathways the afferent and

efferent excitation runs in the central nervous system, and by whichneurones these pathways are formed. For many reflexes it is still not

known whether the pathways run on one or both sides, whether and

where they cross, etc. There is, therefore, much work to be done

before the structure of the central apparatus for body posture will be

known in all details39

36Magnus (1925)p340

37

Magnus (1924)p65338Ibid. p676

39Ibid. p655


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But the activity of the postural reflexes is not restricted to the aftermath of a clearly

defined phasic action. Human activities shade from one into the other, sometimesbringing large swathes of muscles into vigorous activity, sometimes involving no

more than minor movements of body parts or simply a local change in muscular tone.

The postural reflexes play a continuing background role, maintaining a tendency to

bring the musculature back into its natural balanced state. If the neuromusculaturehad no such reference, or default, state to which it automatically had a tendency to

return, there would be nothing to prevent neuromuscular patterns of tension remaining

as residues of phasic activities, and even accumulating to a level at which the overall

functioning of the organism becomes impaired.

Continually recalibrating the senses

Magnus pointed out that the postural reflexes have another critically important role,that of constantly recalibrating the senses. This is necessary because, in the course of

any particular phasic action, not only is the normal resting relationship between the

body parts changed, but the bodys relationship to the external world is also altered.Magnus says that the postural reflexes restore the normal or baseline conditions to

which the exteroceptive and proprioceptive sense organs refer.

In his conclusion to the second Cameron Lecture he puts it this way:

By the action of the subcortical mechanisms described in these lectures

the different sense organs are always brought into the normal relation

with the external world. For the nerve endings in the skin this is

accomplished by the above described attitudinal and righting reflexes.

In the case of the eyes a very complicated reflex mechanism has been

developed differing in various species of animals, which regulates the

position of the eyes in relation to the environment. Here alsolabyrinthine and neck reflexes come into play.45

He then adds some further explanatory words, re-emphasising the importance of this

function of the postural reflexes in continually recalibrating the sensory organs as the

body performs its activities, whether voluntary or reflex:

The result of all these arrangements is that the sense organs are

righted in relation to the external world, so that every sensory

impression, before being transmitted to the cortex cerebri, has already

acquired a certain special condition (local sign) depending on the

previous righting function acting on the whole body or parts of it. In

this way the action of involuntary brain-stem centres plays a veryimportant part in conscious activities, especially as regards spatial

sensations.46

No one knows how Magnus would have carried forward his work on the postural

reflexes. But some tantalising hints of how he might have developed some of his

ideas beyond those set down inBody Posture are contained in the draft of a lecture he

was due to give in Stanford University in 1928. His death prevented the finalisationand delivery of the lecture but Stanford University published it in a book in 1930.

45Magnus (1926b)p588

46Ibid. p588


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Alexander never felt that there was anything esoteric about his approach; he strongly

believed that it should be integrated into normal medical practice and he had a varietyof prominent medical friends who publicly supported him. He was particularly

opposed to quackery and fringe medical cults and was extremely pleased that Dewey

emphasised the scientific nature of his Technique.

In his introduction to one of Alexanders books, Dewey wrote

whilst any theory or principle must ultimately be judged by its

consequences in operation, whilst it must be verified experimentally by

observation of how it works, yet in order to justify a claim to be

scientific, it must provide a method for making evident and observable

what the consequences are; and this method must be such as to afford

a guarantee that the observed consequences actually flow from the

principle. And I unhesitatingly assert that, judged by this standard

Mr Alexanders teaching is scientific in the strictest sense of the

word.73

Alexander continued teaching and training teachers in his methods until his death in1955 just short of his eighty-seventh birthday. His Technique continues to be widely

taught and is particularly strongly supported in the performing arts.

What did Alexander discover?

By the early 1920s, Alexander had become a well-known and successful teacher of

his Technique in the USA and Britain. When he learned, in 1925, that Magnus had

identified a central apparatusin the brainstem which controlled posture, it seems to

have crystallised his thinking about his own methods. He began to refer to the head-

neck relationship as the primary control of the proper use of body. His first

employment of the term appears to have been in a lecture he gave to the Child-StudySociety in February 1925. He also uses the term central control in this lecture butsubsequently primary control was his preferred usage.

In the course of this lecture, Alexander says:

Regarding the central control: in the technique I am using, it will

interest you to know that during the past fifteen years, Magnus has

worked to explain the scientific significance as has been brought to

our notice recently by Sir Charles Sherrington in connection with

that very control which I have been using for twenty five years. The

direction of the head and neck being of primary importance, he found,

as I found, that if we get the right direction from this primary control,the control of the rest of the organism is a simple matter.74

Alexander reiterated his belief that he and Magnus were talking about the same thingon various other occasions. In a letter dated 9 July 1932, published in the British

Medical Journal, he challenged medical men to submit his procedures to whatever

tests as are consistent with their knowledge of physiology, anatomy and

psychology.

He goes on to say:

73Alexander (1923) pxxvii

74Alexander (1995)p148


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REFERENCESALEXANDER, F. M.(1923) Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual- Mouritz, London2004 edition--- (1932) The use of the self- Gollancz, London,(1985 edition)

--- (1946) The universal constant in living- Mouritz, London(2000 edition)

--- (1995) Articles and lectures- Mouritz, London

--- (1995) Articles and lectures - edited by J.M.O.Fischer- Mouritz, London

BARLOW, W. (1978) More talk of Alexander: aspects of the Alexander Technique - Mouritz,London2005BLAND, J., BOUSHET, D. The cervical spine, from anatomy and physiology to clinical care

BERTHOZ, A., GRAF, W.VIDAL, P.(1992)

BLOCH, M.(2004) F.M. The life of Frederick Matthias Alexander- Little, Brown, London

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